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INTRODUCTION TO JAINISM
very ancient scriptural signs and expressions of art. And those were found and photographed. It is remarkable that the diseased and 68- year old Brahmāchārini had begun her research only five years before I met her. She had been a devotee of the Digambaras or gymnosophists for decades though. She told me that someone taught her the Indus script in a dream. The next day she opened "by chance” a book: the page at which it opened showed exactly those signs! They were depictions of ancient sacred signs, but not pictographic or phonetic signs; they were not an early form of Sanskrit, as some have tried to claim, but symbols which can only be understood by the Digambaras. She started her research. Her intuition, supported by her trained microbiologist's eyes, constantly helped her to recognize the weathered inscriptions and read them. She traveled through most of India. Now she has deciphered the whole script and can read it. Moreover it appears by to occur all over India - something which formal archeology had not previously noticed. Most engravings tell about the individual course of life and dying of monks. She herself does not know exactly how this dream and the intuitions have been able to manifest. Perhaps a reawakened memory of a former existence? But from a Jain philosophical point of view the most logical explanation is that someone who has passed away many centuries ago, and who lived in the days the inscriptions were made, made them known to her in detail. The time has now arrived for a person fit for that task to bring this knowledge to humanity again. Her books will send shock waves through the world of archeology; perhaps she will make bitter enemies, and everything will be done to sweep her ideas under the carpet. Therefore it is important to proceed carefully and thoroughly.
We visited the famous caves of Ellora east of Mumbai. There are 34 numbered caves, Hindu, Buddhist as well as Jain. In those days these religions must have lived side by side in brotherhood. That has not always been the case. A relief on a wall of the Kailasa temple - which was entirely hacked out of the bed rock - seems to show that Jains were
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